1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a confocal image generation apparatus, and in particular, it relates to a confocal image generation apparatus for generating a confocal image with visualized super-resolution components.
2. Description of the Related Art
A confocal microscope is a kind of a scanning microscope which scans a sample by moving light that was collected at one point on the sample by a scanning means such as a galvano mirror to generate a sample image, and it is widely used in various fields.
There are various setting items in a confocal microscope, such as a pinhole diameter, a PMT (Photomultiplier Tube) voltage, an output intensity or wavelength of a light source, scanning speed, and the like, and an image quality may significantly change with these settings.
It is known that with regard to the pinhole diameter among such settings, when the pinhole diameter is made sufficiently small with respect to an Airy disk diameter, a resolution component that exceeds a cut-off frequency of an optical system (hereinafter referred to as a super-resolution component) is obtained. Such a technology is disclosed, for example, in Non-Patent Document (T. Wilson and C. Sheppard, “Theory and Practice of Scanning Optical Microscopy”, Academic Press, 1984, Chapter VI, Section 6).